Lack of certain monsters in PSX versions of Doom

I have a couple questions concerning enemy placement in PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom, perhaps someone here could answer them.

1) Why are there no archviles in either version? My only guess is because facing an archvile in a game where you can only save between levels might have been "unfair."

2) Why is it that the Ultra Violence difficulty level is actually closer to Hurt Me Plenty? It was rather disappointing only facing mancubi in ONE level on Final Doom, and no spiders at all.

Its probably the same problem with doom 64 where the game runs out of space for sprite files. How that is is beyond me, but i was told that the consoles after SNES were not meant to hold a lot of sprites. O_o Either that or the guys just got lazy. I'd also imagine that playing Doom style games, with the limited buttons, can be a lot more difficult than playing it on a PC.

Ezxariarch said:

How that is is beyond me, but i was told that the consoles after SNES were not meant to hold a lot of sprites.

Not so O_O: It's not to unfair to assume many consoles post-1995 would be designed for 3D models, hence it's hardware/software would be designed with this in mind, with sprites only there for particle effects or flames.

Ezxariarch said:

How that is is beyond me, but i was told that the consoles after SNES were not meant to hold a lot of sprites.

yeah that's not ture. The Saturn especially has a very powerful sprite engine.

I got my psx to crash on the suburbs level don't kill any monsters let them all live, and soon after my screen goes black.

Maybe that is one of the reasons there is no archvile and no icon of sin, cause it would eventually crash if there where too much monsters on screen at once.

dutch devil said:

I got my psx to crash on the suburbs level don't kill any monsters let them all live, and soon after my screen goes black.

Maybe that is one of the reasons there is no archvile and no icon of sin, cause it would eventually crash if there where too much monsters on screen at once.

That's crazy, the EXACT same thing happened to me once while I was borrowing PSX Doom from a friend. It's easy for Ezxariarch and other to say "...the guys got lazy," but I don't think that's true. Laziness would be like, omitting way too many levels because they didn't feel like coding them for the Playstation, or not putting in the beautiful colored lighting present in both PSX versions of Doom. It makes more sense that they would intentionally omit certain things because of hardware/memory issues or because of the not being able to save within a level issue.

The psx had the nightmare demon altough it looked very cool, it was pretty lame they didn't came up with something all new.
They where pretty tough critters.

[edit]Nightmare spectre I meant.

GoatLord said:

That's crazy, the EXACT same thing happened to me once while I was borrowing PSX Doom from a friend. It's easy for Ezxariarch and other to say "...the guys got lazy," but I don't think that's true. Laziness would be like, omitting way too many levels because they didn't feel like coding them for the Playstation, or not putting in the beautiful colored lighting present in both PSX versions of Doom. It makes more sense that they would intentionally omit certain things because of hardware/memory issues or because of the not being able to save within a level issue.

I could never figure out how exactly the colored lighting in PSX Doom works. In ZDoom the colored lighting looks horrible because it can only use colors that are in the Doom palette, but in PSX Doom the colored lighting looks perfect and seems to somehow overcome this limitation.

That lighting effect looks awsome, that along with the sound effects and music made it so fun.
The psx version of doom/final doom is one of the reasons why I got into mapping for doom.
I always loved the game since it first came out, but the psx versions got me totally hooked on it.

Doom_user said:

I could never figure out how exactly the colored lighting in PSX Doom works. In ZDoom the colored lighting looks horrible because it can only use colors that are in the Doom palette, but in PSX Doom the colored lighting looks perfect and seems to somehow overcome this limitation.

Well, keep in mind that the Playstation's color palette is in the millions. It wouldn't make sense to use a VGA pallete for a 32-bit game. You'll also notice dark areas look a bit nicer in the PSX Dooms, as well.

The lighting in PSX Doom uses Hex values.

>>>>
That lighting effect looks awsome, that along with the sound effects and music made it so fun.
<<<<

The Playstation version also has proper translucent windows, which are used to good effect at the beginning of E1M3. From what I remember the game was also missing a number of background sprite graphics - the metallic columns right at the start of E1M1 are missing, and I can't remember seeing any of the semi-transparent fence-type walls. And the sky in E3 is replaced with animated fire, which looks very impressive and probably took up less memory.

I guess therefore that the programmers simply ran out of texture space in the Playstation. The archvile has a large number of frames compared to the other monsters - it runs around, it reanimates monsters, it clasps its hands together and blasts the player, and it has fire - and it doesn't appear in the game very often, so it would be an obvious candidate to be removed.

Perhaps the the arachnotrons were taken out because their shots would overwhelm the Playstation's ability to draw sprites; a pair of arachnotrons firing on the player at a distance would quickly create a stream of dozens of extra sprites on top of the sprites that the game would already have to draw. The alternative would be to alter the arachnotrons so that they fire bullets in short bursts, but it wouldn't be quite the same.

From what I remember the Playstation had a very limited amount of texture memory, around 2mb or thereabouts, but because most people ran it on a television the texture resolution could be lower than on a PC with a monitor. This could be an urban myth.

The arachnotron was used in psx doom.

Whaaa? The arachs were taken out of PSX Doom? I remember them being in PSX Final Doom...

Read the post again, retard. You did play the game, right?

Of course they were included.

I seriously doubt that hardware sprites were the issue, as a game like DOOM couldn't possibly even use hardware sprites as they are designed on most consoles (they are designed for use in 2D tile engines, not 3D).

I think the issue was purely memory related. Even the "mighty" PSX only had 2 MB main RAM. DOOM on PC demanded at LEAST 4 MB and didn't run well with less than 8. You could swap stuff out all the time, but the PSX also only had a 2x CD-ROM drive, so reads were painfully slow too -- too slow to reload sprites during play. I'm sure it precaches them all at level start, something even the PC version does to an extent.

I know from the interview that the Doom 64 had characters dropped for cart space. This also included the shot gun animations. But for the PSX version (and N64) It just could keep up due to memory. The Saturn had top notch sprite capabilities. Read into a dropped game called Sonic Xtreme and you'll see how good it really was.

Ninja_of_DooM said:

Read the post again, retard. You did play the game, right?

... up until about level five, plus bits of the third episode (just to see the sky that I had read about) at which point I got fed up with the control scheme. Although I'm sure EPSXE has a way of emulating the Playstation mouse, the game itself doesn't support mouse control. Not having the box I have no idea what's in the game beyond that, and I have no desire to play the Playstation version of Doom all the way through in 2006.

What's with the "retard" comment? Christ, that's a low thing to say. You must be an awful person. You don't know me and I don't know you, and you call me a retard. Not even my friends would call me a retard, as a joke.

What's it supposed to achieve? We could have got on or at least co-existed, but now I have to assume that you're a complete tit of the highest order.

When you're old enough to apply for jobs you had better have a very good degree because you're going nowhere with that kind of attitude; unless you plan on not working, or getting a magic job as a level designer in the computer games industry, in which case I hope you fail at an early age. It'll teach you a valuable life lesson.

Best thing to do when someone calls you an retard or whatever else is ignoring the person.

All monsters except the archvile and bossbrain were included in psxdoom.

Doom_user said:

I could never figure out how exactly the colored lighting in PSX Doom works. In ZDoom the colored lighting looks horrible because it can only use colors that are in the Doom palette, but in PSX Doom the colored lighting looks perfect and seems to somehow overcome this limitation.

The sector structure for Psxdoom's maps are changed compared to that of PC Doom's sector structure. The light value is replaced by a pointer. This pointer points to the values stored on LIGHTS.lmp stored in PSXDoom's wad.

The structure for psxdoom's sectors would look something like this:
typedef struct {
short floorheight;
short ceilingheight;
char floorpic[8];
char ceilingpic[8];
int colPtr;
short tag;
short special;
} psxDoomSector_t;

heh.


Also, believe it or not, PSXDoom still uses its oringinal Palette, so the sprites, textures, and patches still has a 256 color limit. I am assuming some gimmick is used to emit the color sector effect. Its almost similar to Boom's colormap specials.

kristus said:

The lighting in PSX Doom uses Hex values.

indeed, but the rgb values are stored as two bytes, so PsxDoom uses a rgb encoding method. Which is common for almost any console platforms.

Quasar said:

I'm sure it precaches them all at level start, something even the PC version does to an extent.

Yeah, including textures. Thats why almost all textures are 64x128. Some textures have even been replaced with more 'simpliar' textures.

Lamancha said:

... up until about level five, plus bits of the third episode (just to see the sky that I had read about) at which point I got fed up with the control scheme. Although I'm sure EPSXE has a way of emulating the Playstation mouse, the game itself doesn't support mouse control. Not having the box I have no idea what's in the game beyond that, and I have no desire to play the Playstation version of Doom all the way through in 2006.

What's with the "retard" comment? Christ, that's a low thing to say. You must be an awful person. You don't know me and I don't know you, and you call me a retard. Not even my friends would call me a retard, as a joke.

What's it supposed to achieve? We could have got on or at least co-existed, but now I have to assume that you're a complete tit of the highest order.

When you're old enough to apply for jobs you had better have a very good degree because you're going nowhere with that kind of attitude; unless you plan on not working, or getting a magic job as a level designer in the computer games industry, in which case I hope you fail at an early age. It'll teach you a valuable life lesson.

I think he was talking to me, because I said "Whaaa? The arachs were taken out of PSX Doom? I remember them being in PSX Final Doom..." because I apparently didn't see the post above me that said they were, in fact in there.

Lamancha said:

When you're old enough to apply for jobs you had better have a very good degree because you're going nowhere with that kind of attitude

Heh, Try again. I already have a job and it's quite a good one too in many respects.

Anyway, yes, I was talking to Goatlord. So who's the dumbass now? You. Afterall, you took the time to compose such a loving reply rather than ignore the post.

Yeah the first doom game I played was Final Doom on my old playstation.
Then I got Doom 64 and all the other doom games like doom doom 2 Final Doom and Doom 3 for pc after that.